Italy's Constitutional Court has upheld the 2025 law that dramatically restricts who can claim Italian citizenship through ancestry, dealing a major blow to millions of people worldwide who had counted on their Italian roots to obtain a passport.
The ruling, which came on March 11, 2026, confirmed the constitutionality of Law 74/2025, known as the Tajani Decree after Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani who introduced it as an emergency measure in March 2025. The court cited state interests in preventing abuse, managing consular backlogs, and preserving the integrity of Italian citizenship.
What the Law Changed
Before the Tajani Decree took effect, Italy operated one of the most permissive citizenship-by-descent systems in the world. Under the old rules, a person could claim Italian citizenship through any ancestor who held it, tracing lineage all the way back to March 17, 1861, the date of Italian unification. This made millions of people in South America, North America, Australia, and elsewhere potentially eligible.
The new law introduced two sweeping restrictions:
- Two-generation cap: Only those with a parent or grandparent born in Italy now qualify for automatic recognition. Claims through great-grandparents or more distant ancestors are effectively barred.
- Single citizenship requirement: The Italian parent or grandparent must have held solely Italian citizenship at the time of their descendant's birth, or at their own death if that came earlier. This effectively disqualifies many family lines where the ancestor naturalized in another country or held dual nationality.
The law also introduced new conditions for children born abroad to Italian parents: citizenship must be declared within one year of birth or adoption, or the child must reside in Italy for two consecutive years after birth.
Retroactive Application
One of the most contentious aspects of the law is its retroactive reach. The restrictions apply to all applications submitted after March 27, 2025, the date the emergency decree entered into force. This means that people who had filed claims before that date remain protected under the old rules, while those who applied afterward, even for cases that would have been valid under the previous framework, fall under the new, stricter criteria.
The retroactive application was one of the central constitutional questions brought to the court. Critics argued it violated legal certainty by changing the rules mid-process for thousands of pending applicants. The court nonetheless found the measure constitutional.
Who Is Affected
Italy's diaspora is estimated at more than 8 million people, with particularly large communities in Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Australia. Under the old system, many of these communities had access to Italian citizenship through ancestry stretching back several generations. Under the new rules, the majority lose that access automatically.
Particularly affected are descendants of the great waves of Italian emigration between 1880 and 1930, whose family lines typically run three, four, or five generations deep. For most of them, the two-generation cap means the path to an Italian passport through ancestry is now closed.
What Options Remain
The Constitutional Court still has two other referrals to consider, meaning the legal battle is not entirely over. Some legal experts suggest the remaining cases could address specific aspects of the law, including the retroactivity provisions, that the March 11 ruling did not fully resolve.
Beyond domestic courts, descendants' advocates are exploring challenges at the European Court of Justice, arguing that the law may conflict with EU principles on free movement and equal treatment of EU citizens. This route could take years to resolve but represents the most significant remaining avenue for those affected.
For those who still qualify under the new rules (descendants with a parent or grandparent born in Italy who held solely Italian citizenship at the relevant time), the advice from immigration lawyers is to apply as soon as possible. Consular appointment backlogs remain severe at Italian embassies worldwide, and further restrictions cannot be ruled out.
Background: Why the Law Was Introduced
The Italian government introduced the Tajani Decree partly in response to what officials described as a citizenship industry, particularly in South America, that had turned jure sanguinis claims into a commercial enterprise. Law firms and agencies were processing thousands of applications for people with tenuous historical connections to Italy, overwhelming Italian consulates and, critics argued, devaluing Italian citizenship.
Italian consulates had reported backlogs of years, in some cases more than a decade, for citizenship-by-descent hearings. The reform was presented as a necessary measure to bring the system back to manageable scale.
